This week's Syria peace talks have been the catalyst, not so much for a battle of wits and ideology in Montreux, but as a war of global headlines for the hearts and minds of listeners and viewers around the world.

This psychological skirmish was polarized between Monday's UN/MIT
revelations that last summer's chemical weapons attack in Ghouta
came from a rebel held area... and Qatar-funded London
solicitors, Carter-Ruck, saying Assad's soldiers tortured 11,000
rebel prisoners. A 31-page report was commissioned by Carter-Ruck
solicitors in London on behalf of the Qatari government.

It's becoming increasingly evident that it is in America and
Europe's newsrooms, as much as on the ground in Syria, that this
war is being fought. Also here in Britain this week, we've seen
jubilant government announcements about the economy 'turning
the corner' with the UK's IMF growth forecast up to 2.4
percent, the highest in the developed world, and unemployment
falling 167,000 to 7.1 percent, the second biggest drop on
record.

The trouble is, as with Syria, the messages could not be more
contrary.

Opposition Labour party leader, Ed Miliband, asserted in the
House of Commons on Wednesday that despite being the seventh
richest country in the world, Britain now has 13 million people,
that's nearly one quarter of the population, living in poverty.
The explosion in the use of mainly church-run food banks, three
times greater this Christmas than last, testifies to a dramatic
escalation in the cost of living which doesn't seem to register
with the IMF. Work is slavery when it doesn't pay enough to live
on.

Even the most basic evidence that Osborne's policies have led to
this positive IMF growth forecast is missing though. Where is the
evidence that these growth figures are attributable to Osborne's
roughly twenty billion pounds of spending cuts so far? The 2010
Labour government left the country's economy growing, so arguably
the IMF forecast would have been even higher without them.

Meanwhile, in Davos, a higher-altitude Switzerland
scene-of-the-crime altogether, 26 billion dollar money
launderers, HSBC, are at the bar with the world's feudal hedge
fund and manufacturing aristocracy bribing our politicians. The
kings of bankster finance, who trotted out heartfelt words
earlier about 'closing the wealth divide' at the
timetabled session, are dividing up the resources of the planet
in the interval.

Miliband's figures, from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, are
echoed by Oxfam too, who point out on this Davos week that the
richest 85 individuals in the world now have more wealth than the
poorest fifty percent of the world’s population—3.5 billion
people! Davos' new global financial aristocracy professes 80
billionaires and hundreds of millionaires in attendance. The
annual Bilderberg Conference, far more secretive, boasts an even
greater concentration of ill-gotten wealth and power.

As the super-wealthy, who already have more mansions and yachts
than they know what to do with, buy up the financial, political
and media opposition an air of psychotic sadism appears to be
'in vogue'. Proud Tory Chancellor of the world's seventh
richest nation, George Osborne, is celebrating his 2.4 percent,
but outside, on the mean streets of his economic miracle,
thirteen million Britons can't afford toilet paper. "Post-war
Social Security is being dismantled", we're told. "It's
simple. If you don't work you won't eat."

So what are viewers and listeners supposed to make of these
contradictions? Without fact checking, IMF or government
pronouncements cause the kind of confusion and disenchantment
that has seen soaring levels of voter apathy. Britain's morale is
sinking to new lows as we watch the Lib/Con Coalition's sadistic
Bedroom Tax evicting the disabled, mentally ill and poorest in
society, only to find that after all that pain the private
housing victims are obliged to move to, costs the taxpayer more.

IBM and the Holocaust - a cautionary tale too disturbing for
mainstream media

Take a trip back sixty years to the Nazi labor camps of the 1940s
and you'll see the same brutish principle operating: 'Arbeit
Macht Frei' ('Work Makes You Free') hangs over the
entrance to the concentration camp. Who cares if there is not
enough work to go round, it's survival of the fittest. What if
you're ill? What if your pay is not enough to live on?

Deserter, prisoner, then Nazi penal regiment soldier, Sven
Hassel, far from glorifying World War Two, articulated its
absurdity and futility. He explained how this sadistic principle
operated at Lengries prison camp in his 1957 book 'Legion Of
The Damned'. After executing five of Hassel's fellow
prisoners, SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Schendrich ordered the rest to
shout a humiliating refrain: "...Tomorrow, Sunday we will go
without our food. For when we do not work, we do not deserve our
food."

We fail to recognize the hallmarks of this merciless mindset at
our peril: In all the millions of column inches about the leaks
of NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, nobody seems to have
noticed his central point. Why has he put life and liberty on the
line to tell us about warrantless data trawls and criminal
hacking by the state?

A centralized database of the population, in their case using
expensive, state-of-the-art IBM 'Hollerith' punch card
machines, was what the Gestapo used to profile, identify and
arrest Jews and other 'untermensch' throughout occupied
Europe. Though US Jewish writer, Edwin Black, penned a
comprehensive account of the use of a government database for
internment and genocide in 2001, 'IBM And The
Holocaust'. Nobody dares make this cautionary correlation
with Snowden's NSA & GCHQ leaks.

Then they subsidized bread, now it's housing

Jonathan Freedland pointed out in the latest edition of BBC Radio
4's 'The Long View' that Britain's seventeenth century
'Poor Laws' subsidized wages so the destitute could buy
bread. Their 21st Century equivalent is government 'housing
benefit', without which almost a third of Britons, most of
whom are in work, would be evicted from their homes. This is the
vicious face of Britain today; our democratic government
motivates its people not by offering them a decent living wage,
but by threatening to evict an 'underclass' of twenty
million.

While that warning sound may be heard, others are not. On
December 18, 2013, former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer and
Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote a devastating article for the
New York Times. In 'Stumbling Toward the Next Crash' he
points out the 'disastrous pre-crisis credit boom' is
happening all over again. Despite this being a clear warning from
Britain's last Prime Minister, Brown's remarks were not
considered weighty enough to be reported by a single London media
outlet. Another public relations 'victory' for the
financial elite.

A new politics to break the banksters' spell – or else

The straightforward way to relieve poverty-stricken Britain is to
break the City of London arm lock on political parties and the
public purse. To close off tax havens then cream it off from the
rich, both individual and corporate. But Tory Prime Minister
David Cameron's father Ian was one of the chief architects of the
1980s Thatcherite tax avoidance bonanza, so that won't happen on
his watch.

A new politics will have to consider a kind of Biblical Jubilee
where, as in Old Testament times, the nation's primary resource,
land, was redistributed so every family had a fair share.
Shocking though it may sound to the left this would lead to a
'small state', usually a clarion-call of the right. As
in the Republic of Ireland: a large number of owner-occupiers,
particularly breaking up the big countryside estates, means less
homelessness, low or no rent, more home grown food, less
dependency on state handouts and, wonder of wonders, less tax.

Whatever the truth behind those contradictions about the state of
the economy and the search for solutions, the mainstream media
refuse to stress test the spin doctors' assertions. Decisions are
made by editors and journalists scared of 'talking down'
the economy, afraid of 'denting market confidence'.
Instead they inject poisonous lies into the nation's nervous
system, endorsing the 'wishful thinking' of the markets,
a toxin that will almost certainly prove fatal leaving us wide
open to Gordon Brown's coming crash.

In the case of the Syria peace talks, the necessity to get to the
truth is equally profound and the failure to do so equally
frightening. Some economists even wonder if the economic and
military crises are two sides to the same coin. That the outbreak
of war could be used as a convenient cover for an economic crash
far worse than 1929. With our present weak, indebted governments,
both the banksters and the military industrial technocrats would
make a killing.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.